Leftovers

• Joel Chrono ☛ More 88x31 buttons

  I do all of my pixel art using GIMP but I also found this online site to make your own button with some pretty simple configuration options available.

• James G ☛ Web remixing

  I have also been thinking about the idea of "remixing," by which I mean being able to create a copy of a web page and customise it the way you want. I am reminded of HTML and CSS themes that people design and share on their websites. I have seen authors offer the theme for others to use on their own site as a starting point. In this way, changing and making the theme one's own is a "remix."

• Science

  • Ruslan Spivak ☛ 5 to 18: Why Your Count Might Be Off by One - Ruslan's Blog

    Quick question:

    How many numbers are there from 5 to 18, including both ends?

• Career/Education

  • Robert Birming ☛ Doing the work

    Meanwhile, others with no special talent still succeed. Why? They put in the hours. They show up. They do the work.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Teach and learn beats RTFM

    A friend of mine has that same attitude and it always bug me because if me and him woulda read one book each and then teach each other what we learned, that would’ve a lot of the time end up saving both of us time, and we would’ve learned things better and being able to bounch ideas off each other and help explain things. Even more so if we were three people who read one book each and taught each other as opposed to reading three books each.

• Hardware

  • David Rosenthal ☛ 2025 Optical Media Durability Update

    It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.

  • The Register UK ☛ Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

    You can find a range of computers in the newly-extended PC Gallery at the museum's site in Bletchley Park, with models on show from an early Amiga 1000 through to the more-powerful 4000 (although the latter is not currently running). Machines, including the ubiquitous Amiga 500, are available for visitors to get some quality hands-on time on with. However, some – such as the early 1000 – are strictly look-and-don't-touch due to their rarity.

    The Register paid a visit, and one of the museum's volunteers, Alex Vinall, was on hand to talk through the collection, the challenges of preserving the aging hardware, and the Great White Whales that she was on the lookout for.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Psychiatrists Warn That Talking to AI Is Leading to Severe Mental Health Issues

    Sifting through academic databases and news articles between November 2024 and July 2025, Duke psychiatry professor Allen Frances and Johns Hopkins cognitive science student Luciana Ramos discovered, as they wrote in a new report for the Psychiatric Times, that the mental health harms caused by AI chatbots might be worse than previously thought.

  • Futurism ☛ Woman Kills Herself After Talking to OpenAI's AI Therapist

    Sophie's tale highlights that even in the absence of a chatbot encouraging self-harm or entertaining conspiratorial and paranoid thoughts, the dangers are very real due to chatbots' lack of common sense and ability to escalate issues in the real world.

  • The Conversation ☛ Part of your brain gets bigger as you get older – here is what that means for you

    Rather than systematically degenerating, older adults’ brains seem to preserve what they use, at least in part. Brain ageing may be compared with a complex machinery in which some often used parts are well oiled, while others less frequently used get roasted. From that perspective, brain ageing is individual, shaped by our lifestyle, including our sensory experiences, reading habits, and cognitive challenges that we take on in everyday life.

  • Mike Brock ☛ What About The Children?

    I have harmed my own children through my screen addiction.

    I write those words and feel them burn. Not because they’re dramatic but because they’re true. I was a tech executive who spent years thinking about both technology and philosophy. I understood these systems from both sides—how they were built and what they were doing to us.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ China's Robots with Artificial Wombs to Carry Human Babies Coming

    This mind-boggling innovation boils down to artificial womb technology. While the concept of supporting life outside the body isn’t entirely new (remember those “biobags” that kept premature lambs alive in 2017?), Kaiwa Technology is taking it further.

    They aim to put a fully functional artificial womb into a humanoid robot, allowing it to sustain a complete pregnancy.

• Proprietary

  • Cloud Chamber has announced an "unspecified" number of layoffs as Rod Fergusson steps in to oversee the challenging production of BioShock 4.

    Cloud Chamber, the developer behind BioShock 4, has reportedly brought on board Rod Fergusson, former head of Diablo, as the studio head amid an unspecified number of layoffs.

    Earlier in the month, Kelley Gilmore, a longtime veteran at Firaxis, exited following significant changes within the BioShock project initiated by Take-Two Interactive. These changes were a result of an internal review that did not meet the publisher 2K Games' expectations.

  • Windows Central ☛ Former Diablo head now in charge of next BioShock — He might be able to save the troubled series (again) [Ed: Layoffs are the real news here]

    This news comes just weeks after a report from Schreier indicated that the next BioShock game was in trouble. Per Schreier, the game recently failed a publisher review, leading to an overhaul that saw the exit of the creative director. A planned remake of the original BioShock was also reportedly put on ice.

  • Oracle layoffs hit India: 10 per cent staff cut, thousands of jobs lost

    Oracle has laid off nearly 10 per cent of its workforce in India after sealing a major deal with OpenAI and holding a high-profile meeting with US President Donald Trump.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Prosecutors charge Rapper Bot administrator after targeting X and thousands more

    Ethan J. Foltz from Eugene, Oregon, was arrested Aug. 6 and stands accused of operating Rapper Bot, also known as “Eleven Eleven Botnet” and “CowBot.” The botnet spanned a network of hijacked internet-connected devices that fueled hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks worldwide.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Officials gain control of Rapper Bot DDoS botnet, charge lead developer and administrator

    The takeover and effective disruption of the botnet, also known as Eleven Eleven Botnet and CowBot, occurred after officials identified and served a warrant at the Oregon residence of a 22-year-old man who allegedly developed and ran the operation since at least 2021.

  • Sean Conner ☛ It was as bad as I feared, but not in the way I was expecting

    It was clear during the conversation that the “wireless service unit” was preconfigured with default settings, enought for my laptop (and Bunny's laptop) to get onto the Internet. After hanging up, I did what I should have done and went to https://192.168.1.254 (as printed on the back of the unit) and configure it via its web interface (I'm now convinced that the “phone app” is nothing more than a web browser that loads the web app from the “wireless service unit”).

    It was at this point that I have to move three book shelves to get to the mess of existing wires supporting the now dead DSL link. My existing wireless router decided to have a fit and for a good half hour I thought it was dead (no, it just took an exceptionally long time to reboot—yes, I was having a grand ol' time here).

  • Ars Technica ☛ High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

    Oddly, RomCom wasn’t the only group exploiting CVE-2025-8088. According to Russian security firm Bi.ZONE, the same vulnerability was being actively exploited by a group it tracks as Paper Werewolf. Also tracked as GOFFEE, the group was also exploiting CVE-2025-6218, a separate high-severity WinRAR vulnerability that received a fix five weeks before CVE-2025-8088 was patched.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Jellyfin on macOS for a quick self-hosted media library

    Switching tracks, I found Jellyfin is also packed up as a .app for macOS, and you can install it by downloading the .dmg and copying the .app to your Mac, or you can do it like I did, with Homebrew: [...]

  • Bitdefender ☛ Speed cameras knocked out after cyber attack

    According to evidence seen by journalists, the Public Prosecution Service took itself offline on July 17, following suspicions that [crackers] had exploited vulnerabilities in Citrix devices to gain unauthorised access.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ OpenAI’s Scam Altman points to AI ‘bubble’

    A number of experts agree: The Apollo investment group’s chief economist noted that tech firms’ price-earnings ratios are unusually elevated, reminiscent of the late-1990s dotcom boom and subsequent crash, and also that spending on data center infrastructure accounts for a worryingly high percentage of US GDP growth.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ The cost to run LLM-powered apps is getting out of hand

    This link post is a good opportunity to state a few things that have been on my mind lately.

  • Justin Searls ☛ Which of your colleagues are screwed? | justin․searls․co

    So instead of directing the following statements at you, let's target our judgment toward your colleagues. Think about a random colleague you don't feel particularly strongly about as you read the following pithy and reductive bullet points. Critically appraise how they show up to work through the entire software delivery process. These represent just a sample of observations I've made about developers who are truly thriving so far in the burgeoning age of AI code generation tools.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ AI, proofing, and the meaning of what we do

    What’s so interesting about this first-world-problem of Western academics, you might ask. Well, for one thing, it seems that commercial publishers are getting more and more involved in using ghost work, but then presumably also use the texts to feed new AIs. This adds to the many arguments for moving away from commercial publishing, but that case is normatively overdetermined anyway – it’s a collective action problem to get there.

    But what I here want to focus on is how this use of AI relates to the meaning of work – or rather, undermines it in a rather specific way.

  • Social Control Media

    • Chuck Carroll ☛ Terminally Online

      I've also noticed that they do not seem to be outraged about what they are actually seeing going on in the world. They are outraged by what their favorite online personalities see, and it's usually their primary source of new information. They get their information on current events through the lens of some random podcast host rather than a professional journalist. Their world is filtered through this online personality. Because of YouTube and social media algorithms, they're fed more and more of the same type of content, which feeds them similar messaging that reinforce their beliefs. What's interesting is how their opinions are the "correct" opinions and not actually biased, but anyone who disagrees with them are the ones that are being manipulated by censorship and social media algorithms. The information they receive is gospel, straight for God's ass, and boy is it important to stay up-to-date on whatever the latest nonsense is. I've had people in my life that assume I live under a rock and don't know what's going on in the world or current events since I'm not on social media.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World

      Burns’ offer to make Sanchez the “face” of Tea wasn't the first time she had reached out to her, but Sanchez never replied to Burns, despite multiple attempts to recruit her. As it turned out, Tea did not have all the “safety measures” it needed to keep women safe. As 404 Media first reported, Tea users’ images, identifying information, and more than a million private conversations, including some about cheating partners and abortions, were compromised in two separate security breaches in late July. The first of these breaches was immediately abused by a community of misogynists on 4chan to humiliate women whose information was compromised.

    • CBS ☛ NYU researchers developing technology to detect hidden GPS trackers

      "If a cyber stalker is looking to track someone, they're not gonna use an AirTag because Apple and Samsung and Android have figured out a way to alert people," he said.

      So, Satt started using a device already on the market called a spectrum analyzer to track signals from nearby electronics. He realized, unlike phones and other devices, GPS trackers send out signals like clockwork to save battery, typically every minute on the dot while moving. That allows him to distinguish a GPS tracker from other devices.

    • The Verge ☛ UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption

      This announcement follows the UK issuing a secret order in January this year, demanding Apple provide it with backdoor access to encrypted files uploaded by users worldwide. In response, Apple pulled the ability for new users in the UK to sign up to its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) encrypted iCloud storage offering, and challenged the order, winning the right to publicly discuss the case in April. Earlier this year, US officials started examining whether the UK order had violated the bilateral CLOUD Act agreement, which bars the UK and US from issuing demands for each other’s data.

    • NYOB ☛ Court decides "Pay or Okay" on DerStandard.at is illegal

      The Austrian Federal Administrative Court (BVwG) has confirmed an earlier decision by the Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) that the Austrian newspaper DerStandard violated the GDPR when introducing "Pay or Okay”. The DSB and the Court both held that users must be able to selectively consent or object to each processing purpose. This case will now likely hit the Austrian Supreme Administrative Court – and potentially the Court of Justice.

    • The Register UK ☛ US spy chief claims UK backdown on Apple backdoor demand

      Apple, which has been fighting the Technical Capability Notice (TCN) through Britain's secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal, didn't immediately respond to The Register's questions.

    • The Record ☛ UK ‘agrees to drop’ demand over Apple iCloud encryption, US intelligence head claims

      In a post on social media, Gabbard said the U.K. “has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”

    • Android Police ☛ Here is the shocking truth about Android's location services

      When you grant permission to access your location all the time, it keeps tracking your location, even when you don't use the app.

• Defence/Aggression

  • US News And World Report ☛ Minnesota Sues TikTok, Alleging It Preys on Young People With Addictive Algorithms

    “This isn’t about free speech. I’m sure they’re gonna holler that," Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a news conference. "It’s actually about deception, manipulation, misrepresentation. This is about a company knowing the dangers, and the dangerous effects of its product, but making and taking no steps to mitigate those harms or inform users of the risks.”

  • Associated Press ☛ Minnesota sues TikTok over addictive algorithms targeting youth

    The lawsuit, filed in state court, alleges that TikTok is violating Minnesota laws against deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud. It follows a flurry of lawsuits filed by more than a dozen states last year alleging the popular short-form video app is designed to be addictive to kids and harms their mental health. Minnesota’s case brings the total to about 24 states, Ellison’s office said.

  • Star Tribune ☛ Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sues TikTok

    “Just like big tobacco designs its products to addict...TikTok is working to create TikTok addicts, and the worst part is it’s working,“ Ellison said. ”TikTok is profiting, making big money, and our kids are paying a heavy price.”

    The lawsuit filed in Hennepin County District Court is the latest example of attorneys general — Democratic and Republican — suing the tech giant. Almost half of U.S. states, from liberal California to deep red Mississippi, have filed suit against TikTok on similar grounds.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Minnesota sues TikTok, alleging it preys on young people with addictive algorithms

    The lawsuit comes while President Donald Trump is still trying to broker a deal to bring the social media platform, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, under American ownership over concerns about the data security of its 170 million American users. While Trump campaigned on banning TikTok, he also gained more than 15 million followers on the platform since he started sharing videos on it.

  • 404 Media ☛ The Government Just Made it Harder for The Public to Comment on Regulations

    The General Services Administration (GSA), which runs regulations.gov, notified API key holders in an email last Monday morning that they’d soon lose the ability to POST directly to the site’s API. POST is a common function that allows users to send data to an application. POST allowed third party organizations like Fight for the Future (FFTF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Public Citizen gather comments from their supporters using their own forms and submit them to the government later.

  • The Verge ☛ The White House just joined TikTok

    The Trump admin opened a new TikTok account, despite not having a deal with ByteDance to solve that pesky ban problem.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ America’s Campuses: The Next Frontline Against Authoritarianism

    But now, the call is coming from inside the house, too. Over the past six months, the Trump administration has undertaken efforts, ranging from illiberal to blatantly unconstitutional, to exact punishment on students, academics, and the universities they attend.

    The fight to combat authoritarianism on campus has, in many ways, grown more difficult in the United States in recent months, but that only makes it more urgent that we challenge it directly and wholly.

    It will not be easy and it will not be cheap. But for institutions whose independence is so vital for the freedom of broader civil society, there is no price we can put on the core values of academic freedom and free expression.

    Here’s what all of us—university leaders, students and academics, legislators, and all Americans—can do to fight back.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Muslim men to be fined for missing Friday prayers in Malaysian state

    Muslim men in a Malaysian state could face up to two years in prison or a hefty fine for skipping Friday prayers without a valid reason under Shariah law.

    Authorities in Terengganu state, which is governed by the conservative Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), announced on Monday that offenders will face a prison sentence or up to RM 3,000 (£525) in fines, or both, under the Shariah Criminal Offences (Takzir) Enactment law.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • EFF ☛ Victory! Pen-Link's Police Tools Are Not Secret

    In a victory for transparency, the government contractor Pen-Link agreed to disclose the prices and descriptions of surveillance products that it sold to a local California Sheriff's office.

• Environment

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Multispectral analysis of the Tres Cantos wildfire with Sentinel-2 data

    However, deeper into the woodlands there seems to be more damage and trees burnt completely. This is not so easy to see from the wall, and I cannot just walk in, as it is private land. Aerial photography would be best, but without it, satellite imagery is the next best thing. It is hard to tell how large the damage is from the visible spectrum imagery, but as we will see in this post, the infrared bands have much more information.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Italy's Ventina Glacier Has Melted So Much Geologists Now Can Only Monitor It Remotely

    Italy’s Ventina glacier in northern Lombardy has melted so much due to climate change that geologists can no longer measure it the way they have for the past 130 years

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Paul Krugman ☛ What Happens If AI Hits An Energy Wall? - Paul Krugman

      This is the way the bubble ends. This is the way the bubble ends. This is the way the bubble ends: Not with a pop, but with smog and brownouts.

      What? I’ll explain in a minute. But first, a word from MechaHitler.

    • Wired ☛ The Plan to Turn the Caribbean’s Glut of Sargassum Into Biofuel

      With record-breaking quantities of the seaweed set to hit Mexico’s beaches, experts propose converting it into biogas and construction materials, as well as using it to underwrite carbon credits.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Michigan News ☛ Inbreeding among Michigan’s rare rattlesnakes is harming their ability to survive

      Biology experts argue that reconnecting habitat corridors for the federally threatened reptile may be the best way to reverse this negative trend affecting one of Michigan’s rarest keystone species.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Habitat Loss Is Leading to Inbreeding Among Michigan's Only Species of Venomous Snake

      Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes are considered a keystone species in Michigan, which means they play a crucial role in the overall health and wellbeing of the state’s wetlands ecosystems. If the reptiles vanish altogether, the delicate balance of these ecosystems will be thrown off, the researchers say.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ SoftBank to take $2B stake in beleaguered chipmaker Intel

    Under the terms of the deal, SoftBank will buy $2 billion worth of Intel’s stock at $23 per share, representing a slight discount on the company’s Monday closing stock price of $23.66. That will give SoftBank around 87 million shares in the company, amounting to a 2% stake overall. As such, the Japanese firm will become Intel’s sixth largest shareholder.

  • World Finance ☛ SoftBank and Saudi Arabia to launch $100bn tech fund | World Finance

    New partnership between Japan’s SoftBank and Saudi Arabia set to create one of the world’s biggest private equity funds

  • Business A M, Nigeria ☛ Softbank-Saudi tech fund becomes world's biggest with $93 billion of capital

    The world’s largest private equity fund, backed by Japan’s Softbank Group and Saudi Arabia’s main sovereign wealth fund, said on Saturday it had raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics.

  • Techdirt ☛ The New CBS Already Promising Major, ‘Painful’ Layoffs

    After paying Trump his $16 million bribe, CBS and Skydance (Trump’s friends in the Ellison family) recently finalized their $8 billion merger. And executives are already indicating that one of the first orders of business will be to fire a significant number of employees.

  • The Conversation ☛ Laws are introduced globally to reduce ‘psychological harm’ online – but there’s no clear definition of what it is

    Unfortunately, when psychological harm and the like are referred to, there is typically no detailed corresponding definition of them. But while we might have an intuitive understanding of what psychological harm is, we still need precision on what it means in law. This means evidencing what it is, agreeing on how to measure it and designing the best methods to tackle it.

    How do we do this? An obvious place to look is psychological science.

  • FAIR ☛ Media in Hiding From the Most Urgent Questions of the Day

    Trump has commandeered Washington, DC, putting National Guard and local police in the streets because DC is not a state, and so it’s the only place he could take over in this way. He’s brandishing a patently false pretense that the district is facing a crime crisis. The reality—and we do remember reality, right?—is that Washington, DC, has its lowest violent crime rate in 30 years.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Mothers Reunite With Their Sons Who Were Deported to CECOT: Photo Essay

    Mireya Sandia was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. Her skin was pale, her white hair nearly gone. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer years earlier, and more recently it had spread to her brain and affected her speech. When we first met, in May, she waved me closer, grabbed my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and said, as best she could:

    “I want to see my son again.” Then she began to cry.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Dissenter ☛ Podcast: Kevin Gosztola On The Disinfo Detox, Hosted By Nolan Higdon

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CS Monitor ☛ New Syrian government lifts bans on books. Readers rejoice.

    “Before we had daily interrogations by the security services,” Mr. Sharqawi says. “Now everything is permitted, nothing is banned. Now is a golden era for books!”

    For decades, any book written by an intellectual or an artist who had expressed opposition to the Assad regime – or who simply did not vocally toe the official line – was banned.

  • Molly White ☛ As he builds US power, Justin Sun fights to control his story

    [Cryptocurrency] billionaire Justin Sun has sued Bloomberg for publishing details about his wealth that he himself provided to qualify for their Billionaire Index. While Sun was initially eager for Bloomberg to publicize his multibillionaire status, he became furious when he learned they planned to publish a rough breakdown of the assets comprising his [cryptocurrency] fortune. This may be because it reveals an inconvenient detail: the majority of his assets are TRX, the cryptocurrency issued by his company Tron — and he owns most of the TRX in circulation (63%). This concentration is somewhat reminiscent of the 2022 revelation that Sam Bankman-Fried had built his [cryptocurrency] empire on a foundation of FTT, the token issued by his own company FTX, sparking concerns about the solvency of his businesses and the value of FTT that ended in the collapse of both.

  • [Repeat] Michael Geist ☛ Out of Nowhere: TIFF Undermines Artistic Freedom of Expression With Forced Name Change of October 7th Documentary

    The controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival decision to remove a Canadian made October 7th documentary film from its lineup focused primarily on the absurd demand for copyright clearances of clips taken by Hamas terrorists on the day of the attack. While TIFF reversed its decision given the enormous backlash over what many rightly perceived to be censorship, another aspect of TIFF’s demands remain in place. According to media reports, the initial title of the documentary was Out of Nowhere: The Ultimate Rescue. TIFF demanded that the name be changed in order to be included in the program, leading to the new title, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue. TIFF staff apparently objected to the phrase “Out of Nowhere”, which suggests that staff believes both that (1) the October 7th attack was not out of nowhere, and (2) that it was appropriate to limit artistic freedom of expression by substituting its political views over those of the creator.

  • RFERL ☛ Iran's Supreme Court Upholds Activist's Second Death Sentence

    Iran's top court has upheld the death sentence against imprisoned labor activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, months after overturning her first death sentence due to legal ambiguities.

  • El País ☛ UK online age verification test cuts visits to porn sites in half

    According to analysis by data firm Similarweb, the downward trend among the most popular sites is widespread. Pornhub lost more than a million visitors in just two weeks, dropping from 3.2 million to two million. Similarweb compared the average number of daily users collected from August 1 to 9 with the average number of users in July. The figures appear conclusive: Pornhub experienced a 47% drop from the day before the new system went into effect to August 8.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Europe’s Free-Speech Problem

    These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ John Boyne: Here’s what happened when they tried to cancel me

    The whole brouhaha ended on Monday when the Polari Prize abandoned this year’s award entirely, an interesting example of self-cancellation, to focus instead on “increasing representation of trans and gender non-conforming judges on the panels”. I don’t doubt that the founders and organisers have been put under just as much pressure over the last week as I have but this statement worries me.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine Trust for Local News workers rally to expand their union

    About three dozen reporters, photographers, page designers and union activists gathered on a brown lawn adjacent to the Portland Press Herald offices and printing plant Tuesday morning to announce their drive to unionize news workers at all of the Maine Trust for Local News’ weekly and daily paper operations around the state.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Defeat of European Socialism Was Far From Inevitable

    Contrary to popular belief, the 1970s was a period in which the European left was at its strongest. Unions were powerful, and socialists felt confident that the changing economy could benefit them. So why was the Left defeated a decade later?

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solipsism

    But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real – as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety – you couldn't possibly set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AOL is shutting down dial-up [Internet] - Telkom beat it by years

    It may be difficult to believe that there are still people in the US using outdated dial-up technology to connect to the [Internet], especially considering how bandwidth-intensive modern communication has become. Dial-up speeds usually topped out at 56kbit/s, although it was possible – and expensive – to get 128kbit/s connections.

  • Techdirt ☛ Net Neutrality Advocates Won’t Appeal Trump Destruction, Say U.S. Courts Are Broken

    A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of already soggy U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight. You might not know this because the U.S. press and many policymakers genuinely don’t appear to care, but it’s happening all the same.

    Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. authoritarians, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and likely irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ FTC Sues Alleged Ticket Scalpers Under the BOTS Act

  As summed up by the suit, the defendants have operated “through an interrelated network of companies that have common or interrelated ownership, officers, managers, business functions, marketing, employees,” and more.

• Patents

  • Chris Hynes ☛ Patents are rarely what they seem to be

    I’ve been involved in a number of patents over the years, but I’ve not written about them before, mostly because the US patent system seems to be more about stifling innovation than encouraging it. And more about funnelling money to lawyers than entrepreneurs. And that’s me trying to be positive about things. In this publication over the years, I’ve also chosen to focus on the grunt work I’ve done and not tout my patent portfolio as an accomplishment in itself.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ You'll Never Guess How Much You Can Get Paid for Rights to Use Your Face to Make AI-Generated Ads on TikTok

      52-year-old Scott Jacqmein is one of the actors behind these AI digital avatars. And though his AI-puppetted mug appears in ads all over the platform, it turns out that selling your soul to a generative model used by a company that makes $10 billion in US ad revenue per year doesn't really pay. Jacqmein's total compensation for completely surrendering his likeness to the whims of advertisers he'll never even meet, shilling products he's never actually tried? $750 and zero royalties, he revealed in a new interview with the New York Times.

• Copyrights

  • EFF ☛ Victory! Ninth Circuit Limits Intrusive DMCA Subpoenas

    Section 512(h) is ostensibly designed to facilitate this system, by giving rightsholders a fast and easy way of identifying anonymous infringers. Section 512(h) allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous [Internet] users, just by asking a court clerk to issue one, and attaching a copy of the infringement notice. In other words, they can wield the court’s power to override an [Internet] user’s right to anonymous speech, without permission from a judge. It’s easy to see why these subpoenas are prone to misuse.

  • David Mead ☛ Bandcamp Friday, August edition

    August 1st was Bandcamp Friday, so I loaded up for the trip to the UK.

    Apparently this month fans "spent more than $3.5 million on Bandcamp. That money went directly to independent artists and labels". This is why I prefer using Bandcamp over other services.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court

    Yet it’s thanks to abusive and invasive ads, and threats to privacy due to incessant online tracking, that ad blockers became so popular.

    There’s a good argument today that an effective ad blocking solution is not just a way to keep out an avalanche of mostly unwanted advertising. In many cases ad blockers are seen as an essential tool in the [Internet] user’s security toolbox and as a result, people are reluctant to turn them off.